Smack Mellon is pleased to present STAR FISH: new large-scale, dimensional drawings by ruby onyinyechi amanze. The work is part of an ongoing, non-linear narrative where aliens, hybrids, and ghosts reside in a magical world of constructed realities, memory, and make believe.
Within the drawings, amanze places equal weight on her figures and the spaces they inhabit. Characters fluidly navigate their self-imagined, chimeric universe positioned between nowhere and everywhere. It is a space where land and sea invert, time travel occurs daily, and flying and walking are interchangeable. There is an overlapping, pseudo-collaged aesthetic to her drawings where there is no beginning or end, first or last, present or future. Instead, all the elements come together in a playfully ambiguous now.
Artworks
About
ruby onyinyechi amanze
ruby onyinyechi amanze (b.1982, Port-Harcourt, Nigeria) is a Brooklyn-based artist of Nigerian descent and British upbringing whose creative practices and processes focus on producing mixed media, paper-based drawings and works. Her art draws inspiration from photography, textiles, architecture and printmaking.
amanze earned her B.F.A., Summa Cum Laude, from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 2012-2013, amanze was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
amanze’s practice builds around questions of how to create drawings that maintain paper’s essence of weightlessness. The large-scaled and multidimensional drawings are part of an ongoing, yet non-linear narrative that employ the malleability of space as the primary antagonist.
A nameless, self-imagined, chimeric universe has simultaneously been positioned between nowhere and everywhere. Using a limited palette of visual elements, including ada the Alien, windows and birds, amanze’s drawings create a non-narrative and expansive world. The construction of this world is largely centered around an interest in the spatial negotiations found in the three-dimensional practices of dance, architecture, and design.
Most recently, amanze completed two-year long residencies at the Queens Museum and as part of the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program, both in New York. She has exhibited her work internationally in Lagos, London, Johannesburg and Paris, and nationally at the California African American Museum, the Drawing Center and the Studio Museum of Harlem. In October 2024, she presented a solo exhibition titled ‘Light Blue Violet’ at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg. Continuing her research on inventing and manipulating spaces, her playful configurations occur both within the two-dimensional drawing plane and into a three-dimensional presentation and experience.
Selected group exhibitions: ‘Follow the North Star: Freedom in the Age of Mobility’, International African American Museum, Charleston, SC (2024); ‘A Superlative Palette: Contemporary Black Women Artists,’ Curated by Dexter Wimberly, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Charlotte, NC (2024); ‘A Slice through the World: Contemporary Artists’ Drawing,’ The Drawing Room and Modern Art Oxford, London, United Kingdom (2018); ‘Affective Affinities,’ 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2018); ‘Regarding the Figure,’ Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, NY; ‘The Ease of Fiction,’ Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2017); ‘the silences between,’ Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2017); ‘Drawing Biennial,’ The Drawing Room, London, United Kingdom (2017); ‘Where Do We Stand?: Two Years of Drawing with Open Sessions,’ The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2017).
Collections include: CSS Bard College Hessel Museum; Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt, Germany; National Museum of African Art Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; The Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, Washington; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.
amanze lives and works between Philadelphia and Brooklyn, but calls multiple places home.
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